Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen

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The language of the pre-exilic historical books is in general muchakin to that of the Jehovistic work; that of the Priestly Code,on the contrary, is quite different. It is common enough tointerpret this fact, as if the latter belonged to an earlierperiod. But not to mention that in that case the Code must havebeen entirely without influence on the history of the language,it agrees ill with this view, that on going back to the oldestdocuments preserved to us of the historical literature of theHebrews we find the difference increasing rather than diminishing.Take Judges v. and 2Samuel i.; the poetical pieces in JE may becompared with them, but in Q there is nothing like them. And onthe other hand, it is in the narratives which were introduced verylate into the history, such as Judges xix.-xxi.; 1Samuel vii.viii. x. 17 seq. xii.; 1Kings xiii., and the apocryphaladditions in 1Kings vi.-viii. that we recognise most readilysome linguistic approximation to the Priestly Code. And as in thehistorical so also in the prophetical literature. The speech ofAmos, Isaiah, Micah, answers on the whole to that of the Jehovist,not to that of the priestly author.

Deuteronomy and the Book of Jeremiah first agree with the PriestlyCode in certain important expressions. In Ezekiel such expressionsare much more numerous, and the agreement is by no means withLeviticus xvii.-xxvi. alone. /1/

******************************************I Especially noticeable is P)T NGB TYMNH in Ezekiel and thePriestly Code. In the latter Negeb, even when it refers to theactual Negeb, yet is used as denoting south (Numbers xxxiv. 3,xxv. 2-4), i.e., it has completely lost its original meaning.******************************************

In the subsequent post-exilic prophets down to Malachi the pointsof contact are limited to details, but do not cease to occur; theyoccur also in the Psalms and in Ecclesiastes. Reminiscences of thePriestly Code are found nowhere but in the Chronicles and some ofthe Psalms. For that Amos iv. 11 is borrowed from Genesis xix. 29is not a whit more clear than that the original of Amos i. 2 mustbe sought in Joel iv. 19 [iii. 16].

The Priestly Code maintains its isolated literary character asagainst the later literature also. This is the result partly ofthe use of a number of technical terms, partly of the incessantrepetition of the same formulae, and of its great poverty oflanguage. But if we neglect what is due to the stiff and hardidiosyncrasy of the author, it is undoubtedly the case that hemakes use of a whole series of characteristic expressions whichare not found before the exile, but gradually emerge and comeinto use after it. The fact is not even denied, it is merelyput aside. To show what weight is due to it we may find roomhere for a short statement of the interesting points for thehistory of language to be found in Genesis i.

Genesis i. 1, R)#YT means in the older Hebrew, not the COMMENCEMENTof a process which goes forward in time, but the FIRST(and generally the BEST) part of a thing. In the sense of abeginning in time, as the contrary to )XRYT, it is first found ina passage of Deuteronomy, xi. 12; then in the titles in the Bookof Jeremiah, xxvi. 1, xxvii. 1, xxviii. 1, xlix. 34, and in Isaiahxlvi. 10, and lastly in the Hagiographa, Job viii. 7, xili. 12;Proverbs xvii. 14; Ecclesiastes vii. 8. In Genesis x. 10R)#YT MMLKTW has a different meaning from that in Jeremiah xxvi. 1in the one it is the principal part of the kingdom; in the otherit is the beginning of the reign. _In the beginning_ was in theearly time, if absolute, BFR)#NH, BATTXLH; if relative, BTXLTTXLT. /1/

*******************************************1 The vocalisation B:R#YT is very curious: we should expectBFRA$YT. It has been attempted to do justice to it by translating:"In the beginning, when God created heaven and earth--but the earthwas without form and void, and darkness lay upon the deep, and thespirit of God brooded over the water--then God spake: Let there belight."But this translation is desperate, and certainly not that followedby the punctuators, for the Jewish tradition (Septuagint, Aquila,Onkelos) is unanimous in translating:"In the beginning God created heaven and earth."In Aramaic, on the contrary, such adverbs take, as is well known,the form of the _status constructus_. Cf. RBT Psalm lxvv. 10, cxx. 6.********************************************

We have already spoken of the wordBR), a word remarkable for its specific theological import. Apartfrom Amos iv. 13 and Isaiah iv. 5 it is first found outside thePriestly Code in the Deuteronomist in Exodus xxxiv. 10, Numbers xvi.30 (?), Deuteronomy iv. 32, and in the Book of Jeremiah, xxxi. 22:then in Ezekiel xxi. 35, xxviii. 13, 15; Malachi ii. 10; in Psalmsli. 12, lxxxix. 13, 48, cii. 19, civ. 30, cxlviii. 5; Ecclesiastesxii. 1. It occurs, however, most frequently, 20 times in fact,in Isaiah xl.-lxvi.; and curiously enough, never in Job, where weshould expect to find it. It has nothing to do with B"R") (cut downwood) and BRY) (fat). /2/

*********************************************2. I do not speak of the use of _Elohim_ and the application ofthe names of God in the Priestly Code: the matter is not yet clearto me. Very curious is H#M, Leviticus xxiv. 11.********************************************

Genesis i. 2, THW WBHW occurs also in Jeremiah iv. 23; Isaiah xxxiv.11. THW alone is not so rare, but it also occurs, Isaiah xxix. 21excepted, only in the later literature Deuteronomy xxxii. 10; 1Samuelxii. 21; Isaiah xxiv. 10, xl. 17, 23, xli. 29, xliv. 9, xlv.18 seq., xlix. 4, lix. 4; Job vi. 18, xii.24, xxvi. 7; Psalmcvii. 40. The verb RXP (brood), which is common in Aramaic, onlyrecurs in a single passage in the Old Testament, and that a lateone, Deuteronomy xxxii. 11. Yet the possibility must be concededthat there was no occasion for its more frequent employment.

Genesis i. 4, HBDYL and NBDL (divide and divide one's self), commonin the Priestly Code, is first used by Deuteronomy and theDeuteronomist (Deuteronomy iv. 41, x.8, xix. 7, xxix. 10; 1Kingsviii. 53), then by Ezekiel (xxii. 26, xxxix. 14, xlii. 10) andthe author of Isaiah xl. seq. (lvi. 3, lix. 2). It is most used bythe writer of Chronicles, (1Chronicles xii. 8, xxiii. 13, xxv. 1;2Chronicles xxv. 10; Ezra vi. 21, viii.24, ix. 1, x. 8, 11, 16 ;Nehemiah x. 2, 29, xiii. 3). On YWM )XD Genesis i. 5 compareJosephus, Antiquities I. i. 1: "That now would be the FIRST day,but Moses says ONE day; I could give the reason of this here, butas I have promised (in the Introduction) to give such reasons foreverything in a separate work, I shall defer the exposition tillthen." The Rabbis also, in Genesis Rabba, feel the difficulty ofthe expression, which, however, has its parallel in the )XD LXD#,which belongs to the later way of speaking. In Syriac theordinary expression is XD B#B); hence in the New Testament MIASABBATWN for the first day of the week.

*********************************************1. It does not mean, as is generally assumed, that which isbeaten out thin, is stretched out. For, firstly, the heaven isnever considered to be made of sheet-metal; secondly, the meaningin question only belongs to the Piel, and the substantive derivedfrom it is RIQQUA(. The Kal, with which RQY( must be connected,is found in Isaiah xiii. 5, xliv. 24; Psalms cxxxvi. 6. It isgenerally translated _spread out_, but quite unwarrantably.Parallel with it are YSD and KWNN (compare Psalms xxiv. 2 with cxxxvi.6); the Septuagint translates in all three passages with stereoun,and accordingly renders RQY( with STEREWMA (firmamentum). Thisrendering, which alone is supported by tradition, and which is verysatisfactory, is confirmed by the Syriac, where the verb RQ( isfrequent in the sense of _fortify_.*********************************************

Genesis i. 10 YMYM (the sea, singular, see i. 22; Leviticus xi. 9,10), is rare in older times, and belongs to lofty poeticallanguage; it is, on the contrary, frequent in Ezekiel (tentimes), and in the Psalms (seven times); and occurs besides in Jobvi. 3; Nehemiah ix. 6 ; Jonah ii. 4 ; Daniel xi. 45. Genesis i. 11MYN (kind), a very peculiar word, especially in the form _Jeminehu_,is found outside of this chapter and Leviticus xiv., Genesis vi. 20,vii. 14, only in Deuteronomy xiv. and Ezekiel xlvii. 10.

Genesis i. 26, DMWT (likeness, verses 1, 3) does not occur in theearlier literature. It first appears in 2Kings xvi. 10, in apost-Deuteronomic passage, for the writer is that of chapter xi.seq., xxi. seq. Then in Ezekiel (15 times), Isaiah xiii. 4, xl.18; 2Chronicles iv. 3; Psalms lxviii. 5. It is a borrowed wordfrom Aramaic; and the corresponding verb only came into use inthe period when Aramaic began to find its way in.

Genesis i. 27 ZFKFR (male) is in earlier times ZFKW.R; forthis is the vocalization in Exodus xxiii. 17, xxxiv. 23; Deuteronomyxvi. 16, xx. 13; and if it is right in these passages, as we cannotdoubt it is, it must be introduced in Exodus xxxiv. 19; Deuteronomyxv. 19; 1Kings xi. 15 seq. as well. In the Priestly Code ZFKFRoccurs with great frequency, and elsewhere only in the laterliterature, Deuteronomy iv. 16; Jeremiah xx. 15, xxx. 6; Ezekiel xvi.17; Isaiah lxvi. 7; Malachi i. 14; Judges xxi. 11, 12; 2Chroniclesxxxi. 16; Ezra viii. As for NQBH (female), matters are even worse.Outside the Priestly Code it is only found in Jeremiah (xxxi. 22)and the Deuteronomist (iv. 16). The Jehovist, it is well known,always says )Y#, W)Y#H even of the lower animals: the editor ofthe Hexateuch, on the contrary, always follows the usage of thePriestly Code.

Genesis i. 28 XYH HRM#T attracts attention by the omission of thearticle with the substantive and its being merely prefixed to thefollowing adjective; as if one should say in Greek, )ANHR (O)AGATHOS instead of (O )ANER (O )AGATHOS. In the same way i. 21YWM H##Y, and ii. 3 YWM H#BY(Y. In Arabic there are someanalogies for this, but on seeking one in Hebrew we have to comedown to the period when it was usual to say KNST HGDWLH. KB#and RDH are Aramaisms. In KBSHWH we find the only verbal suffixin Genesis i. Instead we have always the forms )TM )TW; this isso in the Priestly Code generally. In the Jehovistic main work,in J, these substitutes with )T are only used sometimes and forspecial reasons: it may be generally asserted that they aremore used the later we come down. Parallel with this is the useof )nky in J and )ny in the Priestly Code; the latter formgrows always more frequent in later times.

These remarks carry us beyond Genesis i.; for the Priestly Codegenerally I am now able to refer to F. Giesebrecht's essay onthe criticism of the Hexateuch. Such words as QRBN, (CM, L(MT,(#TY are each, by itself, strong arguments for assuming a latedate for the production of the Priestly Code. We cannot believethat such everyday words should never have come into use in theother literature before the exile, if they were in existence.They cannot be counted technical terms: QRBN used in Hebrew forsacrifice and offering is simply as if an English writer shouldsay priere instead of worship. In such comparisons of thevocabulary we have, however, to consider first the working upand revision which has been at work in every part of the booksof the Bible, and secondly the caprice of the writers in apparenttrifles, such as )NKY and )NY, especially outside the Pentateuch.These two agencies have so dislocated the original facts in thismatter, that in general we can only deal in proportions, and mustbe content with showing that a word occurs say 3 times in theother literature and 27 times in an equal extent of the later. /1/

***************************************1. Too much importance must not be attached to Aramaisms: even whenthey admit of clear demonstration they prove little whileoccurring merely in single instances. We early find remarkablephenomena, such as NDR for NZR (hence NZYR = vovens), N+R for NCR(Amos i. 11 , Y+R for Y+RP?), comp. Arabic _lata_ for _laisa_, Sur.38, 2. Hudh. 84, 1. And yet such an Aramaism as BT #NTH in Numbersxv. 27, or even QRBN, is very remarkable.***************************************

IX.III.2. The study of the history of language is still at a veryelementary stage in Hebrew. In that which pertains to thelexicographer it would do well to include in its scope the propernames of the Old Testament; when it would probably appear thatnot only Parnach (Numbers xxxiv. 25) but also composite names suchas Peda-zur, Peda-el, Nathana-el, Pazi-el, Eli-asaph, point less tothe Mosaic than to the Persian period, and have their analogies inthe Chronicles. On the other hand, the prepositions and particleswould have to be examined the use of the prepositions Beth andLamed in the Priestly Code is very peculiar. That would leadfurther, to syntax; or better still, to rhetoric and style--adiffcult and little cultivated field of study, but one of greatimportance and lending itself readily to comparative treatment.This treatment yields the most far-reaching results in the caseof those parallels which have an undoubted and direct relationto each other. The dependence of the Priestly Code on the Jehovistcannot be more strikingly demonstrated than by comparing its CDYQ,Genesis vi. 9, with the CDYQ BDWR HZH, of Genesis vii. 1 (JE.).The plural DRWT is quite on a line with the MYNYM, and the (MYH)RC, of the Rabbis, and the SPERMATA of Galatians iii. 15; itdoes not denote the successive generations, but contemporaries,the contemporaneous individuals of one and the same generation.

From words we are brought back to things again by noting that theage of the word depends in many cases on the introduction of thething. The name BTR in the Song of Songs, for example,presupposes the cultivation of the malobathron in Syria andPalestine. The Priestly Code enumerates colours, stuffs,goldsmiths' work and jewels, which nowhere occur in the olderliterature: along with the Book of Ezekiel it is the principalquarry in the Old Testament for the history of art; and this isthe less likely to be due to chance, as the geographical horizonof the two works is also the same. There is also some contact inthis respect, though to a less degree, between the Priestly Codeand Isaiah xl.-lxvi., and this must doubtless receive a historicalexplanation in the circumstances of the Babylonian age. /l/

*********************************************1. On Canticles cf. Schuerer's Theol. Lit. Z., 1879, p. 31. Italso, by the names of plants and similar details mentioned in it,is an important source for the history of external civilisation.In Isaiah liv. 11, read with the Septuagint NPK: instead of themeaningless PWK:, and )DNYK instead of )BNYK.********************************************

CHAPTER X. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN TORAH.

What importance the written letter, the book of the law, possessedfor the Jews, we all know from the New Testament. Of ancientIsrael, again, it is said in the introductory poem of Goethe'sWest-Oestlicher Divan, that the word was so important there,because it was a spoken word. The contrast which Goethe evidentlyperceived is really characteristic, and deserves some furtherattention.

X.I.

X.I.1. Even if it be the case that Deuteronomy and the PriestlyCode were only reduced to writing at a late period, still thereremains the Jehovistic legislation (Exodus xx.-xxiii. xxxiv.)which might be regarded as the document which formed thestarting-point of the religious history of Israel. And thisposition is in fact generally claimed for it; yet not for thewhole of it, since it is commonly recognised that the SinaiticBook of the Covenant (Exodus xx.-xxiii. 19) was given to apeople who were settled and thoroughly accustomed to agriculture,and who, moreover, had passed somewhat beyond the earliest stagein the use of money. /1/

The Decalogue alone is commonly maintained to be in the strictestsense Mosaic. This is principally on account of the statementthat it was written down on the two stone tables of the sacredark. Yet of Deuteronomy also we read, both that it was writtenon twelve stones and that it was deposited in the sacred ark(Deuteronomy xxxi. 26). We cannot therefore place implicit relianceon such statements. What is attested in this way of the Decalogueseems to find confirmation in 1Kings viii. 9. But the authorityof this statement is greatly weakened by the fact that it occursin a passage which has undergone the Deuteronomistic revision, andhas been, in addition to this, subjected to interpolation. The moreweight must we therefore allow to the circumstance, which makes fora different conclusion, that the name "The Ark of the Covenant"(i.e., the box of the law) /1/ is peculiar to the later writers,

*****************************************1. Compare 1Kings viii. 21, "the ark wherein is the covenant ofJehovah," and viii 9, "there was nothing in the ark save the twotables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, the tables of thecovenant which Jehovah had made with the children of Israel." TheDeuteronomistic expression "tables of the covenant", alternatesin the Priestly Code with that of "tables of testimony"; i e.,likewise of the law. For H(DWT, "the testimony," 2Kings xi. 12,read HC(DWT, "the bracelets," according to 2Samuel i. 10.*******************************************

and, when it occurs in older narratives, is proved by its sporadicappearance, as well as by a comparison of the Septuagint withthe Massoretic text, to be a correction. In early times the arkwas not a mere casket for the law; the "the ark of Jehovah" was ofitself important, as we see clearly enough from 1Samuel iv.-vi.Like the twelve maccebas which surrounded the altar on the holy hillof Shechem, and which only later assumed the character of monumentsof the law, so the ark of the covenant no doubt arose by a changeof meaning out of the old idol. If there were stones in it at all,they probably served some other purpose than that of writing materials,otherwise they would not have been hidden as a mystery in thedarkness of the sanctuary; they must have been exposed to publicview. Add to this that the tradition is not agreed as to thetenor of the ten words said to have been inserted on the twotables; two decalogues being preserved to us, Exodus xx. andExodus xxxiv., which are quite different from each other. Itresults from this that there was no real or certain knowledge asto what stood on the tables, and further that if there were suchstones in the ark--and probably there were--there was nothingwritten on them. This is not the place to decide which of the twoversions is prior to the other; the negative result we haveobtained is sufficient for our present purpose.

X.I.2. Ancient Israel was certainly not without God-given basesfor the ordering of human life; only they were not fixed inwriting. Usage and tradition were looked on to a large extent asthe institution of the Deity. Thus, for example, the ways andrules of agriculture. Jehovah had instructed the husbandman andtaught him the right way. He it was whose authority gave tothe unwritten laws of custom their binding power. "It is never sodone in Israel," "that is folly in Israel," and similarexpressions of insulted public conscience are of frequent occurrence,and show the power of custom: the fear of God acts as amotive for respecting it. "Surely there is no fear of God inthis place, and they will slay me for my wife's sake," soAbraham says to himself in Gerar. "How shall I do such greatwrong and sin against God?" says Joseph to the woman in Egypt."The people of Sodom were wicked and sinned grievously againstJehovah," we read in Genesis xiii. 13. Similarly Deuteronomyxxv. 18: "The Amalekites attacked Israel on the march, and killedthe stragglers, all that were feeble and fell behind, and fearednot God." We see that the requirements of the Deity are known andof force, not to the Israelites only, but to all the world; andaccordingly they are not to be identified with any positivecommands. The patriarchs observed them long before Moses. "Iknow Abraham," Jehovah says, xviii. 19, "that he will command hischildren to keep the way of Jehovah, to do justice and judgment."

Much greater importance is attached to the special Torah ofJehovah, which not only sets up laws of action of universalvalidity, but shows man the way in special cases of difficulty,where he is at a loss. This Torah is one of the special giftswith which Israel is endowed (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 4); and it isintrusted to the priests, whose influence, during the period ofthe Hebrew kings, of which we are now speaking, rested much moreon this possession than on the privilege of sacrifice. The verbfrom which Torah is derived signifies in its earliest usage togive direction, decision. The participle signifies _giver oforacles_ in the two, examples _gibeath moreh_ and _allon moreh_.The latter expression is explained by another which alternateswith it, "oak of the soothsayers." Now we know that the priestsin the days of Saul and David gave divine oracles by the ephodand the lots connected with it, which answered one way or the otherto a question put in an alternative form. Their Torah grew no doubtout of this practice. /1/ The Urim and Thummim are regarded,

*************************************1. 1Sam xiv. xxiii. xxx. In connection with 1Samuel xxxi. 3I have conjectured that the verb of which Torah is the abstractmeans originally to throw the lot-arrows. The Thummim have beencompared in the most felicitous way by Freytag, and by Lagardeindependently of him (Proph. Chald. p. xlvii.) with theArabian Tamaim, which not only signifies children's amulets butany means of "averruncatio". Urim is probably connected with)RR "to curse" (cf. Iliad i. 11 and Numbers xxiii. 23): the twowords of the formula seem mutually to supplement each other.************************************

according to Deuteronomy xxxiii. 8, as the true and universal insigniaof the priesthood; the ephod is last mentioned in the historicalbooks in 1Kings ii. 26, /1/

but appears to have remained in use down to the time of Isaiah(Hosea iii. 4; Isaiah xxx. 22). The Torah freed itself in theprocess of time, following the general mental movement, from suchheathenish media and vehicles (Hab. ii. 19). But it continuedto be an oral decision and direction. As a whole it is only apower and activity of God, or of the priests. Of this subjectthere can be no abstract; the TEACHING; is only thought of asthe action of the TEACHER. There is no torah as a ready-madeproduct, as a system existing independently of its originator andaccessible to every one: it becomes actual only in the variousutterances, which naturally form by degrees the basis of a fixedtradition. "They preserve Thy word, and keep Thy law; they teachJacob Thy judgments and Israel Thy statutes " (Deuteronomy xxxiii.9, 10).

The Torah of the priests appears to have had primarily a legalcharacter. In cases which there was no regular authority todecide, or which were too difficult for human decision, the latterwas brought in the last instance before God, i.e., before thesanctuary or the priests (Exodus xviii. 25 seq.). The prieststhus formed a kind of supreme court, which, however, rested on avoluntary recognition of its moral authority, and could notsupport its decisions by force. "If a man sin against another,God shall judge him," 1Samuel ii. 25 says, very indefinitely.Certain legal transactions of special solemnity are executedbefore God (Exodus xxi. 6). Now in proportion as the executivegained strength under the monarchy, _jus_--civil justice--necessarilygrew up into a separate existence from the older sacred _fas_. Theknowledge of God, which Hosea (chapter iv.) regards as the contentsof the torah, has as yet a closer connection with jurisprudencethan with theology; but as its practical issue is that Godrequires of man righteousness, and faithfulness, and good-will,it is fundamentally and essentially morality, though moralityat that time addressed its demands less to the conscience thanto society. A ritual tradition naturally developed itself evenbefore the exile (2Kings xvii. 27, 28). But only those riteswere included in the Torah which the priests had to teach others,not those which they discharged themselves; even in Leviticusthis distinction may be traced; the instructions characterisedas toroth being chiefly those as to animals which might or mightnot be eaten, as to clean and unclean states, as to leprosy andits marks (cf. Deuteronomy xxiv. 8).

So it was in Israel, to which the testimony applies which we havecited: and so it was in Judah also. There was a common proverb inthe days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, "The Torah shall not perishfrom the priest, nor counsel from the ancient, nor the word fromthe prophet:" but no doubt the saying was not new in their time,and at any rate it will apply to the earlier time as well. Notbecause they sacrifice but because they teach, do the priestshere appear as pillars of the religious order of things; andtheir Torah is a living power, equal to the occasion andnever-failing. Micah reproaches them with judging for reward(iii. 11), and this shows their wisdom to have been based on atradition accessible to them alone; this is also shown by someexpressions of Deuteronomy (xvii. 10 seq., xxiv. 8). We havethe counterpart to the proverb above cited (Jeremiah xviii. 18;Ezekiel vii. 26) in the complaint in Lamentations (ii. 9):"Jerusalem is destroyed; her king and her princes are among theGentiles: the Torah is no more; the prophets obtain no visionfrom Jehovah;" after the ruin of the sanctuary and the prieststhere is no longer any Torah; and if that be so, the axe is laidto the root of the life of the people. In the post-exile prophetsthe torah, which even in Deuteronomy (xvii. 11) was mainlylegal in its nature, acquires a strong savour of ritual which onedid not notice before; yet even here it is still an oral teachingof the priests (Haggai ii. 11).

The priests derived their Torah from Moses: they claimed onlyto preserve and guard what Moses had left (Deuteronomy xxxiii 4,9 seq.). He counted as their ancestor (xxxiii. 8; Judges xviii.30); his father in-law is the PRIEST of Midian at Mount Sinai,as Jehovah also is derived in a certain sense from the older deityof Sinai. But at the same time Moses was reputed to be theincomparable originator and practicer of PROPHECY (Numbers xii. 6seq.; Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10; Hos. xii. 14), as his brother Aaronalso is not only a Levite (Exodus iv. 14), but also a prophet(iv. 15; Numbers xii. 2). There is thus a close relation betweenpriests and prophets, i.e., seers; as with other peoples (1Samuelvi.,; 1Kings xviii. 19, compare with 2Kings x. 19), so alsowith the Hebrews. In the earliest time it was not knowing thetechnique of worship, which was still very simple andundeveloped, but being a man of God, standing on an intimatefooting with God, that made a man a priest, that is one who keepsup the communication with heaven for others; and the seer isbetter qualified than others for the office (1Kings xviii. 30seq.). There is no fixed distinction in early times between thetwo offices; Samuel is in 1Samuel i.-iii. an aspirant to thepriesthood; in ix. x. he is regarded as a seer.

In later times also, when priests and prophets drew off andseparated from each other, they yet remained connected, both inthe kingdom of Israel (Host iv. 5) and in Judah. In the latterthis was very markedly the case (2Kings xxiii. 2; Jeremiah xxvi.7 seq., v. 31; Deuteronomy xviii. 1-8, 9-22; Zechariah vii. 3).What connected them with each other was the revelation of Jehovahwhich went on and was kept alive in both of them. It is Jehovahfrom whom the torah of the priest and the word of the prophetproceeds: He is the true DIRECTOR, as Isaiah calls Him in thepassage xxx. 20 seq., where, speaking of the Messianic time,he says to the people, "Then thy director (MWRYK) is no moreconcealed, but thine eyes see thy director, and thine ears hearthe words of One calling behind thee; this is the way, walk yein it; when ye are turning to the right hand or to the left."TORAH and WORD are cognate notions, and capable of beinginterchanged (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9; Isaiah i. 10, ii. 3, v. 24,viii. 16, 20). This explains how both priests and prophetsclaimed Moses for their order: he was not regarded as the founderof the cultus.

The difference, in the period when it had fully developed itself,may be said to be this: the Torah of the priests was like aspring which runs always, that of the prophets like a spring whichis intermittent, but when it does break forth, flows with all thegreater force. The priests take precedence of the prophets whenboth are named together; they obviously consolidated themselvesearlier and more strongly. The order, and the tradition whichpropagates itself within the order, are essential to them:they observe and keep the torah (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9).For this reason, that they take their stand so entirely on thetradition, and depend on it, their claim to have Moses fortheir father, the beginner and founder of their tradition,is in itself the better founded of the two. /l/

***********************************1 It is also more firmly rooted in history; for if Moses didanything at all, he certainly founded the sanctuary at Kadeshand the torah there, which the priests of the ark carried on afterhim, thus continuing the thread of the history of Israel, whichwas taken up again in power by the monarchy. The prophets onlyappeared among the Hebrews from the time of Samuel onwards, butthe seers were older than Moses, and can scarcely have had sucha close connection with his tradition as the priests at thesanctuary of the ark of Jehovah.**********************************

In the ordinary parlance of the Hebrews torah always meant first,and chiefly the Priestly Torah. The prophets have notoriously nofather (1Samuel x. 12), their importance rests on theindividuals; it is characteristic that only names and sketchesof their lives have reached us. They do indeed, following thetendency of the times, draw together in corporations; but indoing so they really renounce their own distinctivecharacteristics: the representative men are always single,resting on nothing outside themselves. We have thus on the oneside the tradition of a class, which suffices for the occasions ofordinary life, and on the other the inspiration of awakenedindividuals, stirred up by occasions which are more than ordinary.After the spirit of the oldest men of God, Moses at the head ofthem, had been in a fashion laid to sleep in institutions,it sought and found in the prophets a new opening; the old fireburst out like a volcano through the strata which once, too, rosefluid from the deep, but now were fixed and dead.

The element in which the prophets live is the storm of the world'shistory, which sweeps away human institutions; in which therubbish of past generations with the houses built on it begins toshake, and that foundation alone remains firm, which needs nosupport but itself. When the earth trembles and seems to be passingaway, then they triumph because Jehovah alone is exalted. Theydo not preach on set texts; they speak out of the spirit whichjudges all things and itself is judged of no man. Where do theyever lean on any other authority than the truth of what theysay; where do they rest on any other foundation than their owncertainty? It belongs to the notion of prophecy of truerevelation, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinancesand institutions, communicates Himself to the INDIVIDUAL, thecalled one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport inwhich the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy.Apart from the prophet, _in abstracto_, there is no revelation;it lives in his divine-human ego. This gives rise to a synthesisof apparent contradictions: the subjective in the highest sense,which is exalted above all ordinances, is the truly objective,the divine. This it proves itself to be by the consent of theconscience of all, on which the prophets count, just as Jesusdoes in the Gospel of John, in spite of all their polemicagainst the traditional religion. They are not saying anythingnew: they are only proclaiming old truth. While acting in themost creative way they feel entirely passive: the _homo tantumet audacia_ which may with perfect justice be applied to such menas Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah, is with them equivalent to _deustantum et servitus_. But their creed is not to be found inany book. It is barbarism, in dealing with such a phenomenon, todistort its physiognomy by introducing the law.

X.I.3. It is a vain imagination to suppose that the prophetsexpounded and applied the law. Malachi (circa 450 B.C.) says,it is true, iv. 4, "Remember ye the torah of Moses my servant;"but where shall we look for any second expression of this nature?Much more correctly than modern scholars did these men judge, whoat the close of the preexilic history looked back on the forceswhich had moulded it, both the divine and those opposed to God.In their eyes the prophets are not the expounders of Moses, buthis continuators and equals; the word of God in their mouth isnot less weighty than in the mouth of Moses; they, as well as he,are organs of the spirit of Jehovah by which He is present inIsrael. The immediate revelation to the people, we read in Deuteronomyxviii., ceased with the ten commandments: from that point onwardsJehovah uses the prophets as His mouth: "A prophet like untothee," He says to Moses, "will I raise up to them from among theirbrethren, and will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speakunto them all that I shall command him; and whosoever shall nothearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I willrequire it of him."We find it the same in Jeremiah; the voice of the prophets, alwayssounding when there is need for it, occupies the place which,according to the prevailing view, should have been filled by thelaw: this living command of Jehovah is all he knows of, and notany testament given once for all."This only I commanded your fathers when I brought them up outof Egypt: Obey my voice, and walk ye in all the ways that I willcommand you. Since the day that your fathers came forth out of Egypt,I have sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising upearly and sending them; but ye would not hear."And even after the exile we meet in Zechariah (520 B.C.) thefollowing view of the significance of the prophets: "Thus spakeJehovah of hosts [to the fathers before the exile], Speak true judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother,and oppress not the widow nor the fatherless, the stranger nor thepoor: and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in hisheart. But they refused to hearken, and shrugged the shoulder,and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they madetheir hearts as a flint, lest they should hear the Torah and thewords which Jehovah Sebaoth hath sent by His Spirit through theold prophets: therefore came a great wrath from Jehovah Sebaoth.And as He cried and they would not hear, so now shall they cryand I will not hear, and I will blow them away among thepeoples.... Thus saith Jehovah Sebaoth [after the exile to thepresent generation], As I thought to punish you without pitybecause your fathers provoked me to anger, so again have Ithought in these days to do well to the house of Judah: fearye not. These are the things that ye shall do: Speak ye everyman the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truthand peace in your gates; and let none of you imagine evil inyour hearts against his neighbour, and love no false oath,for all these are things which I hate, saith Jehovah"(Zechariah vii. 9-11, viii. 14-16).The contents of the Torah, on obedience to which the theocracy ishere based, are very suggestive, as also its derivation from the"old" prophets. Even Ezra can say (ix. 10, 11):"We have forsaken Thy commandments which Thou hast commanded by theservants the prophets, saying, The land unto which ye go topossess it is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people ofthe land, which have filled it from one end to another with theiruncleanness."He is thinking of Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, and Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.

Of those who at the end reflected on the meaning of thedevelopment which had run its course, the writer of Isaiahxl.-lxvi. occupies the first place. The Torah, which he alsocalls _mishpat_, right (i.e., truth), appears to him to be thedivine and imperishable element in Israel. With him, however,it is inseparable from its mouthpiece, the servant of Jehovah,xlii. 1-4, xlix. 1-6, l. 4-9, lii. 13-liii. 12. The name woulddenote the prophet, but here it stands for the people, a propheton a large scale. Israel's calling is not that of theworld-monarchies, to make sensation and noise in the streets(xiii. 1-4), but the greater one of promulgating the Torah andgetting it received. This is to be done both in Israel and amongthe heathen. What makes Israel a prophet is not his own innerqualities, but his relation to Jehovah, his calling as thedepository of divine truth: hence it involves no contradictionthat the servant should begin his work in Israel itself. /1/

*************************************1. This is as if one were to say that there is much to be donebefore we Evangelicals are truly evangelical. Yet thedistinction as worked out in Isaiah xl. seq. is certainly veryremarkable, and speaks for a surprising degree of profoundmeditation.************************************

Till now he has spent his strength only in the bosom of his ownpeople, which is always inclined to fall away from Jehovah andfrom itself: heedless of reproach and suffering he has labouredunweariedly in carrying out the behests of his Master and hasdeclared His word. All in vain. He has not been able to avertthe victory of heathenism in Israel, now followed by its victoryover Israel. Now in the exile Jehovah has severed His relationwith His people; the individual Hebrews survive, but the servant,the people of Jehovah, is dead. Then is the Torah to die withhim, and truth itself to succumb to falsehood, to heathenism?That cannot be; truth must prevail, must come to the light.As to the Apostle Paul the Spirit is the earnest of theresurrection of those who are born again, so to our author theTorah is the pledge of the resurrection of Israel, thejustification of the servant of Jehovah. The final triumph ofthe cause, which is God's, will surpass all expectations. Notonly in Israel itself will the Torah, will the servant of Jehovahprevail and bring about a regeneration of the people: the truthwill in the future shine forth from Israel into the whole world,and obtain the victory among all the Gentiles (xlix. 6). Then itwill appear that the work of the servant, resultless as it seemedto be up to the exile, has yet not been in vain.

It is surely unnecessary for me to demonstrate how uncommonlyvivid, I might say how uncommonly historical, the notion of theTorah is as here set forth, and how entirely incompatible thatnotion is with "the Torah of Moses." It might most fitly becompared with the Logos of the prologue of John, if the latteris understood in accordance with John x. 35, an utterancecertainly authentic, and not according to Philo. As Jesus isthe revelation of God made man, so the servant of Jehovah isthe revelation of God made a people. The similarity of theirnature and their significance involves the similarity of theirwork and of their sufferings, so that the Messianic interpretationof Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12 is in fact one which could not fail tosuggest itself. /1/

******************************************1. The personification is carried further in this passage thananywhere else, and it is possible that the colours of the sketchare borrowed from some actual instance of a prophet-martyr: yetthe Ebed Jahve cannot have a different meaning here from thatwhich it has everywhere else. It is to be noted that thesufferings and death of the servant are in the past, and hisglorification in the future, a long pause lying between them inthe present. A resurrection of the individual could not be inthe mind of the writer of Isaiah xl seq., nor do the details ofthe description, lii. 12 seq., at all agree with such an idea.Moreover, it is clear that liv. 1-lvi. 8 is a kind of sermon onthe text lii. 13-liii. 12; and there the prophecy of theglorification of the servant has reference to Zion. See Vatke,p. 528 seq.*******************************************

X.II.

X.II.1. In the 18th year of King Josiah (621 B.C) Deuteronomy wasfound and published. In the account of the discovery, 2Kingsxxii. xxiii., it is always called simply _the book of the Torah_;it was accordingly the first, and in its time the only book ofthe kind. It is certainly the case that the prophets had writtendown some of their speeches before this, and the priests also maybefore this time have written down many of their precepts: itappears in fact, as Vatke surmises, that we have a monument oftheir spirit, e.g., in the Sinaitic Book of the Covenant.Deuteronomy presupposes earlier attempts of this kind, andborrows its materials largely from them; but on the other hand itis distinguished from them not only by its greater compass butalso by its much higher claims. It is written with the distinctintention not to remain a private memorandum, but to obtain publicauthority as a book. The idea of making a definite formulatedwritten Torah the law of the land, is the important point /1/

it was a first attempt and succeeded at the outset beyondexpectation. A reaction set in afterwards, it is true; but theBabylonian exile completed the triumph of the law. Extraordinaryexcitement was at that time followed by the deepest depression(Amos viii. 11 seq.). At such a time those who did not despairof the future clung anxiously to the religious acquisitions of thepast. These had been put in a book just in time in Deuteronomy,with a view to practical use in the civil and religious life ofthe people . The book of the Torah did not perish in the generalruin, but remained in existence, and was the compass of those whowere shaping their course for a new Israel. How thoroughlydetermined they were to use it as their rule we see from therevision of the Hexateuch and of the historical books which was takenin hand during the exile.

With the appearance of the law came to an end the old freedom,not only in the sphere of worship, now restricted to Jerusalem,but in the sphere of the religious spirit as well. There was nowin existence an authority as objective as could be; and this wasthe death of prophecy.

For it was a necessary condition of prophecy that the taresshould be at liberty to grow up beside the wheat. The signs givenin Deuteronomy to distinguish the true from the false prophet,are no doubt vague and unpractical: still they show the tendencytowards control and the introduction of uniformity; that is thegreat step which is new. /1/

****************************************1. The difference between Deuteronomy xviii. 22 and 1Kings xxii.19-23 may be thought to throw light on the two positions. In theformer passage we read that if a prophet says something in thename of Jehovah which does not come to pass, it is a word whichJehovah has not spoken. Here, on the contrary, Micaiah ben Imlah,when the prophets of Jehovah promise the king of Israel a happyissue of the campaign against the Syrians, regards the predictionas contrary to the truth, but as none the less on that accountinspired by the spirit of prophecy; Jehovah, he said, had madehis spirit a Iying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. Itmay be that this difference reflects to us the interval betweentwo different ages: but on the whole Micaiah's view appears to berather a piece of ingenuity which might have been resorted to inlater times as well. In the seventh century the command, "everyfirstborn is mine," was held to apply to the human firstborn aswell, the sacrifice of which Jehovah was thought to require: thisappears from Jeremiah's protest, "I commanded them not, neithercame it into my mind," vii. 31, xix. 5. With reference to thisEzekiel says that because the Israelites despised the wholesomecommandments of Jehovah, He gave them laws which were not good andstatutes by which they could not live. That is a similaringenious escape from a difficulty, without deeper meaning. Seethe converse, Koran, Sura ii. 174.*********************************************

It certainly was not the intention of the legislator to encroachupon the spoken Torah or the free word. But the consequence,favoured by outward circumstances, was not to be avoided: thefeeling that the prophets had come to an end did not arise in theMaccabean wars only. In the exile we hear the complaint that theinstruction of the priests and the word of the prophets are silent(Lamentations ii. 9); it is asked, where he is who in former timesput his spirit in Israel (Isa lxiii. 11); in Nehemiah's time adoubtful question is left unsettled, at least theoretically, tillthe priest with Urim and Thummim, i.e., with a trustworthyprophecy, shall appear (Nehemiah vii. 69). We may call Jeremiah thelast of the prophets: /2/

*********************************2. In his early years Jeremiah had a share in the introduction ofthe law: but in later times he shows himself little edified bythe effects it produced: the Iying pen of the scribes, he says,has written for a lie. People despised the prophetic word becausethey had the Torah in black and white (viii. 7-9).**********************************

those who came after him were prophets only in name. Ezekiel hadswallowed a book (iii. 1-3), and gave it out again. He also,like Zechariah, calls the pre-exilic prophets the old prophets,conscious that he himself belongs to the epigoni: he meditates ontheir words like Daniel and comments on them in his own prophecy(xxxviii. 17, xxxix. 8). The writer of Isaiah xl. seq. might withmuch more reason be called a prophet, but he does not claim to beone; his anonymity, which is evidently intentional, leaves no doubtas to this. He is, in fact, more of a theologian: he is principallyoccupied in reflecting on the results of the foregoing development,of which prophecy had been the leaven; these are fixed possessionsnow secured; he is gathering in the harvest. As for the prophetsafter the exile, we have already seen how Zechariah speaks of theold prophets as a series which is closed, in which he and thoselike him are not to be reckoned. In the writing of an anonymouscontemporary which is appended to his book we find the followingnotable expression:"In that (hoped-for) day, saith Jehovah, I will cut off the namesof the idols out of the land, that they be no more remembered,and also I will cause to cease the prophets and the uncleanspirit; and if a man will yet prophesy, his parents shall sayunto him, Thou shalt not live, for thou speakest lies in the nameof Jehovah, and his parents shall thrust him through when heprophesieth" (xiii. 2-3).

X.II.2. Deuteronomy was the programme of a reform, not of arestoration. It took for granted the existence of the cultus,and only corrected it in certain general respects. But the templewas now destroyed and the worship interrupted, and the practice ofpast times had to be written down if it was not to be lost. Thusit came about that in the exile the conduct of worship became thesubject of the Torah, and in this process reformation was naturallyaimed at as well as restoration. We have seen ) thatEzekiel was the first to take this step which the circumstances ofthe time indicated. In the last part of his work he made thefirst attempt to record the ritual which had been customary inthe temple of Jerusalem. Other priests attached themselves to him(Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.), and thus there grew up in the exile fromamong the members of this profession a kind of school of peoplewho reduced to writing and to a system what they had formerlypracticed in the way of their calling. After the temple wasrestored this theoretical zeal still continued to work, and theritual when renewed was still further developed by the action andreaction on each other of theory and practice: the priests whohad stayed in Babylon took as great a part, from a distance, inthe sacred services, as their brothers at Jerusalem who hadactually to conduct them. The latter indeed lived in adversecircumstances and do not appear to have conformed with greatstrictness or accuracy to the observances which had been agreedupon. The last result of this labour of many years is thePriestly Code. It has indeed been said that we cannot ascribethe creation of such a work to an age which was bent on nothingbut repristination. Granted that this is a correct description ofit, such an age is peculiarly fitted for an artificialsystematising of given materials, and this is what the originalityof the Priestly Code in substance amounts to. /1/

********************************************1. Dillmann arrives at the conclusion that the assumption is themost natural one in the world, and still capable of proof from ACD(!) that the priesthood of the central sanctuary wrote down theirtoroth even in early times; and that it is absurd to supposethat the priestly and ceremonial laws were first written down,or even made, in the exile and in Babylon, where there was noworship. We will let it be absurd, if it is true. It is notprogress, though it is a fact, that the kings were succeeded bythe high-priests, and the prophets by the Rabbis. Yet it is athing which is likely to occur, that a body of traditionalpractice should only be written down when it is threatening todie out, and that a book should be, as it were, the ghost of alife which is closed.********************************************

The Priestly Code, worked into the Pentateuch as the standardlegislative element in it, became the definite "Mosaic law."As such it was published and introduced in the year 444 B.C.,a century after the exile . In the interval, the duration of whichis frequently under-estimated, Deuteronomy alone had been knownand recognised as the written Torah, though as a fact the essays ofEzekiel and his successors may have had no inconsiderableinfluence in leading circles. The man who made the Pentateuch theconstitution of Judaism was the Babylonian priest and scribe,Ezra. He had come from Babylon to Jerusalem as early as the year458 B.C., the seventh of Artaxerxes Longimanus, at the head of aconsiderable company of zealous Jews, provided it is said with amandate from the Persian king, empowering him to reform accordingto the law the congregation of the temple, which had not yet beenable to consolidate itself inwardly nor to shut itself offsufficiently from those without.

"Thou art sent of the king and of his seven counsellors to hold aninquiry concerning Judah and Jerusalem _according to the law of thyGod which is in thine hand_....And thou Ezra, according to _thewisdom of thy God which is in thine hand_, set magistrates andjudges which may judge all the people that are beyond the river,all such as acknowledge the laws of thy God, and teach ye themthat know them not. And whosoever will not do the law of thy Godand the law of the king, let him be prosecuted."So we read in the commission of the Persian king to Ezra, vii.12-26; which, even should it be spurious, must yet reflect theviews of his contemporaries. The expression taken from Ezra'sown memoirs, vii. 27, leaves no doubt that he was assisted byArtaxerxes in the objects he had in view. /1/

***************************************1. With regard to his relation to the law, we have to consider thefollowing points: he was a scribe (SWPR = literatus), at home inthe Torah of Moses, vii. 6. He had directed his mind to studythe Torah of Jehovah, and to do and to teach in Israel judgmentand statute, vii. 10. "The priest Ezra, the master of the lawof the God of heaven," vii. 21. The most important expression,however, is that which states that the law (the wisdom) of his Godwas in his hand: thus it was his private property, though itclaimed authority for all Israel. With this agree the statementsas to the object of the learned priest's mission.**************************************

But Ezra did not, as we should expect, at once introduce the lawon his arrival in Judah. In concert with the heads of the people,and proceeding on the existing Torah, that, namely, ofDeuteronony, he ordained and relentlessly carried out a strictseparation of the returned exiles from the heathen andhalf-heathen inhabitants of the land. This was done a few monthsafter his arrival in Jerusalem. But a long time, at leastfourteen years, elapsed before he produced the law which he hadbrought with him. Why he delayed so long we can at the best onlysurmise, as no accounts have reached us of what he did in theinterval; there is a great gap in the narrative of the Books ofEzra and Nehemiah between the 7th and the 20th year of Artaxerxes.Perhaps the outward circumstances of the young community, which,probably in consequence of the repellent attitude taken up to thesurrounding peoples, were not of the happiest, made it unadvisableat once to introduce a legislative innovation; perhaps, too, Ezradesired to wait to see the correcting influence of the practice ofJerusalem on the product of Babylonian scholarship, and moreoverto train up assistants for the work. The principal reason,however, appears to have been, that in spite of the good-will ofthe king he did not enjoy the energetic support of the Persianauthorities on the spot, and could not without it get theauthority of the new law recognised.

But in the year 445 it came about that a Jew and a sympathiser ofEzra, Nehemiah ben Hakkelejah, cup-bearer and favourite ofArtaxerxes, appeared in Judea as Persian governor. Withstraightforward earnestness he first addressed himself to the taskof liberating the Jewish community from outward pressure andlifting them up from their depressed condition; and, this beingaccomplished, the time had come to go forward with the introductionof the Pentateuch. Ezra and Nehemiah were manifestly in concertas to this. On the 1st day of the 7th month--we do not know theyear, but it cannot have been earlier than 444 B.C.--the wholepeople came together as one man before the water-gate, and Ezrawas called on to produce the book of the law of Moses, whichJehovah had commanded Israel. The scribe mounted a wooden pulpit;seven priests stood beside him on the right hand, and seven on theleft. When he opened the book all present stood up, both men andwomen; with loud Amen they joined in the opening blessing, liftedup their heads, and cast themselves on the ground. Then he readthe book, from early morning till mid-day, in small sections,which were repeated and expounded by a number of Levites dispersedthroughout the crowd. The effect was that a general weeping arose,the people being aware that they had not till then followed thecommandments of God. Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites had toallay the excitement, and said: "This day is holy unto Jehovahyour God; mourn not nor weep. Go your way, eat the fat and drinkthe sweet, and give unto them that have brought nothing with them."The assembled people then dispersed and set on foot a "great mirth,"because they had understood the words which had been communicatedto them. The reading was continued the next day, but before theheads of families only, and a very appropriate section was read,viz., the ordinances as to festivals, and particularly that aboutthe feast of tabernacles, which was to be kept under branches oftrees on the 15th day of the 7th month, the month then justbeginning. The matter was taken up with the greatest zeal, andthe festival, which had not been kept RITE since the daysof Joshua ben Nun, was now instituted in accordance with theprecepts of Leviticus xxiii. and celebrated with general enthusiasmfrom the 15th to the 22nd of the month. /1/

***************************************1. For eight days, according to Leviticus xxiii. 39: as againstDeuteronomy xvi. 13-15.***************************************

On the 24th, however, a great day of humiliation was held, withsackcloth and ashes. On this occasion also the proceedings beganwith reading the law, and then followed a confession of sinsspoken by the Levites in the name of the people, and concludingwith a prayer for mercy and compassion. This was preparatory tothe principal and concluding act, in which the secular andspiritual officials and elders, 85 in number, bound themselvesin writing to the Book of the Law, published by Ezra, and allthe rest undertook an obligation, with oath and curse, to walkin the Torah of God, given by His servant Moses, and to keepall the commandments of Jehovah and His statutes and laws.Special attention was directed to such provisions of the Pentateuchas were of immediate importance for the people in the circumstancesof the day--the greater part of the whole work is about the ritualof the priests--and those were in particular insisted on whichrefer to the contributions of the laity to the priesthood, onwhich the very existence of the hierocracy depended. /1/

***************************************1. Nehemiah viii. 1-x. 40. The credibility of the narrativeappears on the face of it. The writer of Chronicles did not writeit himself, but took it from his main source, from which also hedrew the fragments he gives us of the memoirs of Ezra andNehemiah. This we see from the fact that while copying Nehemiah vii.in Ezra ii. he unconsciously goes on with the beginning of Nehemiahviii. (= Ezra iii. 1). That shows that he found Nehemiah vii. andviii. in their present connection, and did not write viii. seq.himself, as we might suppose.**************************************

Lagarde expresses great surprise--and the surprise is reasonable--that so little importance is attributed to this narrative by OldTestament critics; only Kuenen had rightly appreciated itssignificance. /2/

It is obvious that Nehemiah viii.-x. is a close parallel to 2Kingsxxii. xxiii., especially to xxiii. 1-3. There we read thatJosiah caused all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem to cometogether, and went up with the men of Judah and the inhabitants ofJerusalem, with the priests and the prophets and all the people,high and low, to the house of Jehovah; where he read to theassemblage all the words of the Book of the Law, and bound himselfwith all the people before Jehovah to keep all the words of thebook. Just as it is in evidence that Deuteronomy became known inthe year 621, and that it was unknown up to that date, so it is inevidence that the remaining Torah of the Pentateuch--for there isno doubt that the law of Ezra was the whole Pentateuch--becameknown in the year 444 and was unknown till then. This shows in thefirst place, and puts it beyond question, that Deuteronomy is thefirst, and the priestly Torah the second, stage of thelegislation. But in the second place, as we are accustomed toinfer the date of the composition of Deuteronomy from itspublication and introduction by Josiah, so we must infer the dateof the composition of the Priestly Code from its publication andintroduction by Ezra and Nehemiah. It would require very stronginternal evidence to destroy the probability, thus based on amost positive statement of facts, that the codification of theritual only took place in the post-exile period. We have alreadyseen of what nature the internal evidence is which is broughtforward with this view. /1/

********************************************1. It is not, however, necessary, and it can scarcely be correct,to make Ezra more than the editor, the real and principal editor,of the Hexateuch: and in particular he is not likely to havebeen the author of Q. Nor on the other hand is it meant to denythat many new features may have been added and alterations madeafter Ezra. A body of customs is a subject which can scarcelybe treated quite exhaustively. There are no directions about the_nervus ischiadicus_ , about the priestshaving their feet bare, about shutting up before Jehovah(1Samuel xxi cf. Jeremiah xxxvi. 5), or about the stoning of adulterers.*******************************************

X.II.3. Ezra and Nehemiah, and the eighty-five men of the greatassembly (Nehemiah viii. seq.), who are named as signatories ofthe covenant, are regarded by later tradition as the founders ofthe canon. And not without reason: only King Josiah has a stillstronger claim to this place of honour. The introduction of thelaw, first Deuteronomy, and then the whole Pentateuch, was in factthe decisive step, by which the written took the place of thespoken word, and the people of the word became a "people of thebook." To THE BOOK were added in course of time THE BOOKS; theformer was formally and solemnly introduced in two successiveacts, the latter acquired imperceptibly a similar public authorityfor the Jewish church. The notion of the canon proceeds entirelyfrom that of the written Torah; the prophets and the hagiographaare also called Torah by the Jews, though not Torah of Moses.

The origin of the canon thus lies, thanks to the two narratives2Kings xxii. xxiii., Nehemiah viii.-x. in the full light ofhistory; but the traditional science of Biblical introduction hasno clear or satisfactory account to give of it. Josiah, theordinary notion is, introduced the law, but not the canon; Ezra,on the other hand, the canon and not the law. An analogy drawnfrom the secondary part of the canon, the prophets andhagiographa, is applied without consideration to the primarypart, the Torah of Moses. The historical and prophetical bookswere, in part at least, a long time in existence before theybecame canonical, and the same, it is thought, might be the casewith the law. But the case of the law is essentially different.The law claims to have public authority, to be a book of thecommunity; the difference between law and canon, does not exist.Hence it is easy to understand that the Torah, though as aliterary product later than the historical and prophetical books,is yet as law older than these writings, which have originallyand in their nature no legal character, but only acquired sucha character in a sort of metaphorical way, through their associationwith the law itself.

When it is recognised that THE CANON is what distinguishes Judaismfrom ancient Israel, it is recognised at the same time that whatdistinguishes Judaism from ancient Israel is THE WRITTEN TORAH.The water which in old times rose from a spring, the Epigonistored up in cisterns.

CHAPTER XI. THE THEOCRACY AS IDEA AND AS INSTITUTION.

Writers of the present day play with the expressions "theocracy,"and "theocratic" without making it clear to themselveswhat these words mean and how far they are entitled to use them.But we know that the word theokratia was only coined byJosephus; /1/

***************************************1. )OUKOUN )APEIROI MEN (AI KATA MEROS TWN )ETHWN KAI TWN NOMWN PARATOIS )APASIN )ANTHRWPOS DIAFORAI. )OI MEN GAR MONARXIAIS, (OI DETAIS )OLIGWN DUNASTEIAIS, )ALLOI DE TOIS PLHTHESIN )EPETREPYAN THN'ECOUSIAN TWN POLITEUMATWN. (O D' (HMETEROS NOMOQETHS )EIS MENTOUTWN OUD' (OTIOUN )APEIDEN, (WS D' )AN TIS )EIPOI BIASAMENOS TONLOGON QEOKRATIAN )APEDEICE TO POLITEUMA, QEW| THN )ARXHN KAI TOKRATOS )ANAQEIS (contra Apion ii. 17). (" There are innumerabledifferences in the particular customs and laws that are amongmankind; some have intrusted the power of their states tomonarchies, some to oligarchies, and some to democracies: but ourlegislator had no regard to any of these forms, _but he orderedour governmernt to be what I may call by a strained expression atheocracy_, attributing the power and the authority to God."Compare also, on this whole chapter, Die Pharisaer und dieSadducaer, Greifswald, 1874.*****************************************

and when this writer speaks of the Mosaic constitution, he hasbefore his eyes, it is well known, the sacred community of hisown day as it existed down to the year 70 A.D. In ancient Israelthe theocracy never existed in fact as a form of constitution.The rule of Jehovah is here an ideal representation; only afterthe exile was it attempted to realise it in the shape of a Rule ofthe Holy with outward means. It is perhaps the principal meritof Vatke's Biblical Theology to have traced through the centuriesthe rise of the theocracy and the metamorphosis of the idea to aninstitution.

XI.I.

XI.I.1. The upholders of the prevailing view do not assert thatMoses wrote the Pentateuch, but they maintain all the more firmlythat he organised the congregation of the tabernacle in thewilderness after the fashion described in the Priestly Code. Theyseem to think that Moses had no importance further than this; asif it were an act of no moment to cast into the field of time aseed which the action and reaction thence arising bring animmeasurable time after to maturity (Mark iv. 26 seq.). In factMoses is the originator of the Mosaic constitution in about thesame way as Peter is the founder of the Roman hierarchy. Of thesacred organisation supposed to have existed from the earliesttimes, there is no trace in the time of the judges and the kings.It is thought to have been a sort of pedagogic strait-waistcoat,to subdue the ungovernable obstinacy of the Hebrews and to guardthem from evil influences from without. But even should it beconceded that a constitution could come into existence in ancienttimes which was so utterly out of relation to the peculiar lifeand temper of the people, the history of the ancient Israelitesshows us nothing so distinctly as the uncommon freshness andnaturalness of their impulses. The persons who appear alwaysact from the constraining impulse of their nature, the men ofGod not less than the murderers and adulterers: they are suchfigures as could only grow up in the open air. Judaism, whichrealised the Mosaic constitution and carried it out logically,left no free scope for the individual; but in ancient Israelthe divine right did not attach to the institution but was inthe Creator Spirit, in individuals. Not only did they speaklike the prophets, they also acted like the judges and kings,from their own free impulse, not in accordance with an outwardnorm, and yet, or just because of this, in the Spirit of Jehovah.The different view of different times is seen very characteristicallyin the views taken of Saul by the two versions above sifted andcompared .

XI.I.2. It is a simple and yet a very important remark of Vatke,that the sacred constitution of the congregation, so circumstantiallydescribed to us in the Priestly Code, is after all verydefective, and presupposes the existence of that which it was thechief task of the age of Moses to bring about, namely the state,in the absence of which the church cannot have any subsistenceeither. To maintain an elaborate and expensive worship, and animmense swarm of clergy, must have required considerable rates andtaxes: and to raise these, as well as to uphold the authority ofthe sacred persons and institutions, and most of all to enforcethe strict centralization and uniformity of the legitimateworship, all this among a people not yet very civilised, must haverequired an executive power which embraced and was able tocontrol, the whole people. But where is this central authorityin the period of the judges? Judicial competence resided at thattime chiefly in the smallest circles, the families and houses.These were but little controlled, as it appears, by the superiorpower of the tribe, and the very notion of the state or of thekingdom did not as yet exist. Houses related to each othersometimes united for common undertakings, as no doubt also didneighbouring tribes; but this was not on the basis of anyconstitutional order, but from necessity, when it happened thata well-known man came forward to take the command and his summonsto the levy was obeyed. These transient combinations under generalswere the forerunners of a permanent union under a king: and evenat the time of the Midianite war an attempt seems to have beenmade in this direction, which, however, was not quite successful.In the severe and protracted struggle with the Philistines thenecessity for a solid union of the tribes was cryingly manifest,and the man came forward to meet the hour. Saul, a distinguishedBenjamite of Gibeah, was overcome by anger at the scornfulchallenge which even the Ammonites ventured at such a time to castin the teeth of his people: he called his fellow-countrymen to battle,not in virtue of any office he held, but on the strength of hisown impulses; his enthusiasm proved contagious, none dared to sayhim nay. He began his career just like one of the earlier judges,but after he had led his people to victory they did not let himretire again. The person sought for, the king, was found.

Out of such natural beginnings did the state at that time arise:it owed nothing to the pattern of the "Mosaic theocracy," butbears all the marks of a new creation. Saul and David first madeout of the Hebrew tribes a real people in the political sense(Deuteronomy xxxiii. 5). David was in the eyes of later generationsinseparable from the idea of Israel: he was the king parexcellence: Saul was thrown into the shade, but both together arethe founders of the kingdom, and have thus a much wider importancethan any of their successors. It was they who drew the life ofthe people together at a centre, and gave it an aim; to them thenation is indebted for its historical self-consciousness. All theorder of aftertimes is built up on the monarchy; it is the soilout of which all the other institutions of Israel grow up. In thetime of the judges, we read, every man did that which was rightin his own eyes, not because the Mosaic constitution was not inforce, but because there was no king in those days. Theconsequences were very important in the sphere of religion as well:since the political advance of the people brought the historicand national character of Jehovah to the front again. During thetime of the judges the Canaanite festival cultus had graduallybeen coming to be embodied in the worship of Jehovah, a processwhich was certainly necessary; but in this process there was forsome time a danger that Jehovah would become a God of husbandryand of cattle, like Baal-Dionysus. The festivals long continuedto be a source of heathenism, but now they were gradually divestedof their character as nature-festivals, and forced at length tohave reference to the nation and to its history, if they were notto disappear completely. The relation of Jehovah to people andkingdom remained firm as a rock: even to the worst idolaters He wasthe God of Israel; in war no one thought of looking for victoryand success to any other God. This was the result of Israel'sbecoming a kingdom: the kingship of Jehovah, in that precisesense which we associate with it, is the religious expression ofthe fact of the foundation of the kingdom by Saul and David. Thetheocracy was the state of itself; the ancient Israelitesregarded the civil state as a miracle, or, in their own words,a help of God. When the later Jews thought or spoke of thetheocracy, they took the state for granted as already there, andso they could build the theocracy on the top of it as aspecially spiritual feature: just as we moderns sometimes see thedivine element in settled ordinances, such as marriage, not intheir own nature, but in the consecration added to them by the church.

XI.I.3. The kingdom of Saul and David did not long remain at itsheight. Decay set in even at the separation, and when once theAssyrians were heard at the door, it advanced with steps not to bearrested. But the memory of the period of glory and power wasall the greener, and the hope arose of its return. From thecontrast between the sorrowful present and the brilliant past therearose the picture of the state as it should be; when ruin wasseen without and anarchy within, the prophets set against thisthe pattern of the theocracy. The theocracy as the prophetsrepresent it to themselves is not a thing essentially differentfrom the political community, as a spiritual differs from a secularpower; rather, it rests on the same foundations and is in factthe ideal of the state. Isaiah gave this ideal its classical formin those pictures of the future which we are accustomed to callMessianic prophecies. These passages are not predictions of thisor that occurrence, but announcements of the aims which, it is true,the prophet only expects the future to realise, but which are offorce or ought to be of force in the present, and towards which thecommunity, if true to its own nature, must strive.

The first feature of these Messianic descriptions is the expulsionof the Assyrians; but most emphasis is laid on the restoration ofthe inner bases of the state, the rottenness of which has broughtabout and rendered inevitable the present crisis. The collapse ofthe government, the paralysis fallen on the law, the spoliation ofthe weak by the strong, these are the evils that call for redress."How is the honourable city become a harlot; it was full ofjudgment, righteousness lodged in it--but now murderers! Thyprinces are rascals and companions of thieves, every one lovethgifts and followeth after bribes; they judge not the fatherless,neither cloth the cause of the widow come unto them. Thereforesaith the Lord: Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avengeme of mine enemies! And I will turn my hand against thee, Zion,and as with Iye I will purge away thy dross, and I will restorethy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at thebeginning; afterwards thou shalt be called a righteous andhonourable city. Zion shall be redeemed by judgment and herinhabitants by righteousness" (Isaiah i. 21-27).The state the prophet has before his eye is always the naturalstate as it exists, never a community distinguished by a peculiarholiness in its organisation. The kingdom of Jehovah is with himentirely identical with the kingdom of David; the tasks he setsbefore it are political in their nature, similar, we might say,to the demands one would address to the Turkish Empire in our owndays. He is unconscious of any difference between human and divinelaw: law in itself, jurist's law in the proper juristic sense ofthe word, is divine, and has behind it the authority of the HolyOne of Israel. In that day shall Jehovah of hosts be for a crown of glory and adiadem of beauty unto the residue of His people, and for a spiritof judgment to him that sitteth in judgment, and a spirit of strengthto them that drive back the battle from the borders " (xxviii. 5, 6).Jehovah is a true and perfect King, hence justice is His principalattribute and His chief demand. And this justice is a purely forensicor social notion: the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount canonly come into consideration when civil justice and order have cometo be a matter of course--which at that time they had not yet done.

The representative of Jehovah is the human king. The earthlyruler is not in the way of the heavenly: even the gloriouskingdom of the future cannot dispense with him."Then a king shall reign in righteousness and princes shall rulein judgment; each of them shall be as an hiding-place from the windand as a covert from the tempest; as rivers of waters in a dry place,as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land" (xxxii. 1, 2).As the reigning king is in general unsatisfactory, Isaiah hopes fora new one who will answer the pattern of David of old, the Messiah."There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and abranch shall grow out of his roots: and the spirit of Jehovahshall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, thespirit of counsel and of warlike might, the spirit of knowledgeand of the fear of the Lord; and His breath shall be drawn in thefear of Jehovah. And He shall not judge after the sight of Hiseyes, nor decide by hearsay: but with righteousness shall Hejudge the poor, and give sentence with equity for the meek of theearth; but He shall smite the scorners with the rod of His mouth,and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked, so thatrighteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, and faithfulnessthe girdle of His reins. Then the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: and the calf and theyoung lion together, and a little child shall lead them. And thecow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie downtogether; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox: and thesucking child shall stroke the head of the adder, and the weanedchild shall put his hand on the eye-ball of the basilisk. Theyshall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain" (xi. 1-9)This is generally considered to be a prediction of a universalgolden age on earth; but Isaiah only speaks of the holymountain as the scene, meaning by this the whole city of Davidas the centre of his kingdom. The just and strict government ofthe descendant of David is to bring it about that righteousnessand truth kiss each other, and that the strong do not dare toinjure the weak. Fear of the severity of the law engendersgeneral confidence; the lamb is no longer afraid of the wolf. Theopposite of this ideal is lawlessness and anarchy within, not warwithout; the hope is not that of international peace, as we seeboth from verse 1-5 and from verse 9. The Messiah is adorned justwith the virtues which befit a ruler; and this shows sufficientlywhat is the nature of the kingdom of which he is to be the head,i.e., what is the notion of the theocracy.

The other prophets of this period agree with Isaiah (Lamentations iv.20), only Hosea is peculiar in this as in other points. Heappears to have regarded the kingdom as such as an evil; in morethan one expression he makes it the antithesis of the rule ofJehovah. But we have to remember that this judgment of his isbased entirely on his historical experience. In the kingdom ofthe ten tribes the supreme power was constantly being seized byusurpers, so that instead of being the pillar of order and law itwas the plaything of parties and the occasion of incessantdisturbances. It is this North-Israelite kingdom that Hosea hasin view; and he reprobates it for no other reason than that, inthe three hundred years of its existence, it has not approveditself, and does not approve itself in the present time of need.He does not proceed as on _a priori_ theory, he does not apply ashis rule a pattern of the theocratic constitution givenantecedently to any historical development. There can be nodoubt that it never entered his head that the form God desired thecommunity to take was not a thing to be determined by circumstances,but had been revealed at Mount Sinai. /1/

*****************************************1. He even speaks with favour of David and the kingdom of Judah,but I consider all such references in Hosea (as well as in Amos)to, be interpolations. In i. 7 there is a reference to thedeliverance of Jerusalem under Hezekiah.*****************************************

XI.I.4. Nor did the theocracy exist from the time of Moses in theform of the covenant, though that was afterwards a favourite modeof regarding it. The relation of Jehovah to Israel was in its natureand origin a natural one; there was no interval between Him andHis people to call for thought or question. Only when theexistence of Israel had come to be threatened by the Syrians andAssyrians, did such prophets as Elijah and Amos raise the Deityhigh above the people, sever the natural bond between them, andput in its place a relation depending on conditions, conditions ofa moral character. To them Jehovah was the God of righteousnessin the first place, and the God of Israel in the second place, andeven that only so far as Israel came up to the righteous demandswhich in His grace He had revealed to him. They inverted theorder of these two fundamental articles of faith. "If your sinsare as scarlet, how should they be reckoned white as snow? Ifthey are red like crimson, how should they be as wool? If yebe willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land,but if ye refuse and rebel, ye must eat the sword, for the mouthof Jehovah hath spoken it."Thus the nature of the conditions which Jehovah required of Hispeople came to the very front in considering His relations withthem: the Torah of Jehovah, which originally, like all His dealings,fell under the category of divine aid, especially in the doing ofjustice, of divine guidance in the solution of difficult questions,was now conceived of as incorporating the demands on the fulfilmentof which His attitude towards Israel entirely depended. In this wayarose, from ideas which easily suggested it, but yet as an entirelynew thing, the substance of the notion of covenant or treaty. Thename Berith, however, does not occur in the old prophets, not evenin Hosea, who certainly presents us as clearly as possible withthe thing, in his figure of the marriage of Jehovah and Israel(Isaiah i. 21). That he was unacquainted with the technical usageof Berith is strikingly proved by ii. 20 and vi. 7; and thesepassages must decide the view we take of viii. 1, a passage whichis probably interpolated.

The NAME Berith comes, it is likely, from quite a differentquarter. The ancient Hebrews had no other conception of law norany other designation for it than that of a treaty. A law onlyobtained force by the fact of those to whom it was given bindingthemselves to keep it. So it is in Exodus xxiv. 3-8, and in2Kings xxiii. 1-3; so also in Jeremiah xxxiv. 8 seq.--curiouslyenough just as with the people of Mecca at the time of Mohammed(lbn Hisham, p. 230 seq.). Hence also the term Sepher Berith forthe Deuteronomic as well as the Jehovistic Book of the Law.

This use of the phrase Berith (ie., treaty) for law, fitted verywell with the great idea of the prophets, and received from it inturn an interpretation, according to which the relation of Jehovahto Israel was conditioned by the demands of His righteousness, asset forth in His word and instruction. In this view of the matterJehovah and Israel came to be regarded as the contracting partiesof the covenant by which the various representatives of the peoplehad originally pledged each other to keep, say, the Deuteronomiclaw. /1/

*****************************************I This variation gained entrance the more easily as Berith is usedin various applications, e.g:, of the capitulation, the terms ofwhich are imposed by the stronger on the weaker party: that thecontracting parties had equal rights was by no means involved inthe notion of the Berith. See the wavering of the notion inJeremiah xxxiv. 13-18.*******************************************

After the solemn and far-reaching act by which Josiah introducedthis law, the notion of covenant-making between Jehovah and Israelappears to have occupied the central position in religious thought:it prevails in Deuteronomy, in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, in Isaiah xl.-lxvi.,Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., and most of all in the Book of the FourCovenants. The Babylonian exile no doubt helped, as the Assyrianexile had previously done, to familiarise the Jewish mind with theidea that the covenant depended on conditions, and might possibly bedissolved.

XI.II.

XI.II.1. The tabernacle of David fell at last, and no king was bornto set it up again. The state suffered not a crisis, butdestruction. And the result was that such of the religious hopesof the people as they still held fast, were no longer limited toexisting political conditions, but now took a freer flight, becametinged with enthusiasm, and cast off all restrictions. In formertimes there was always an enemy threatening in the background, adanger really approaching, to give rise to the expectation of agreat conflagration, the materials for which had long beencollected in the nation itself: but after the exile fancy dealtin general coalitions of God knows what peoples against the NewJerusalem, vaticinations for which there was no ground whateverin reality. /1/

In earlier times the national state as it had existed under Davidwas the goal of all wishes. Now a universal world empire waserected in imagination, which was to lift up its head at Jerusalemover the ruins of the heathen powers. Prophecy was no longertied to history, nor supported by it.

But the extravagant hopes now built on Jehovah were balanced onthe other side by sober and realisable aims which the course ofhistory presented. Those who waited for the consolation ofIsrael were then confronted from the nature of their situationwith practical tasks. The old prophets were satisfied withexpressing their ideas, with criticising existing evils; as topractical points they had nothing to say, the leadership of thepeople was in other hands. But the old community being now goneand its heads having fallen with it, the godly both had the powerand felt the obligation to place themselves at the head of theIsrael now to be anew created, after which they had long beenstriving, and their faith in which was still unshaken. In formertimes the nation had not been so seriously threatened as that itscontinued existence, notwithstanding the dangerous crises it mighthave to pass through, should ever cease to be regarded as natural,as a thing of course. But now this was by no means a thing ofcourse, the danger was a pressing one that the Jewish exiles,like the Samaritan exiles before them, would be absorbed by theheathens among whom they dwelt. In that case the Messianic hopesalso would have lost their point of application, for, however trueit was that the realising of them was Jehovah's concern, the men muststill be there to whom they were to be fulfilled. Thus everythingdepended on getting the sacred remnant safe across this danger, andgiving it so solid an organisation that it might survive thestorms and keep alive the expectation of the promise.

But in the eyes of those whose words had weight in the restorationthe old community, as it had existed formerly, was not in goodrepute. They could not but allow Jehovah's sentence ofcondemnation to be just which He had spoken by the mouth of Hisservants and through the voice of history. The utterances of theprophets, that fortresses and horses and men of war, that kings andprinces, cannot help, were called to mind and turned into practicalprinciples: the sole rule of Jehovah was to be carried out in earnest.Circumstances favoured the design, and this was the great point.As matters then were, the reconstitution of an actual state wasnot to be thought of, the foreign rule would not admit of it (Ezraiv. 19 seq.). What plan was to be taken, what materials to beused for such a building as the times allowed? The propheticideas would not serve as building stones; they were notsufficiently practical. Then appeared the importance ofinstitutions, of traditional forms, for the conservation even ofthe spiritual side of the religion.

The Jewish royal temple had early overshadowed the othersanctuaries, and in the course of the seventh century they wereextinct or verging on extinction. Under the shelter of themonarchy the priests of Jerusalem had grown great and had at lastattained, as against their professional brethren elsewhere, aposition of exclusive legitimacy. The weaker the state grew, thedeeper it sank from the fall of Josiah onwards, the higher becamethe prestige of the temple in the eyes of the people, and thegreater and the more independent grew the power of its numerouspriesthood; how much more do we feel it in Jeremiah's time than inthat of Isaiah! This advance of the priesthood indicates unmistakablythe rise into prominence of the cultus in the seventh century,a rise rather helped than hindered by the long reign of Manasseh,evil as is the reputation of that reign. It shows itself not onlyin the introduction of more luxurious materials, incense, for example,but even more in the importance given to great and striking services,e.g., the sacrifice of children, and the expiatory offering. Evenafter the abolition of the horrid atrocities of Manasseh's time,the bloody earnestness remained behind with which the performanceof divine service was gone about.

So closely was the cultus of Jerusalem interwoven with theconsciousness of the Jewish people, and so strongly had thepriesthood established their order, that after the collapse of thekingdom the elements still survived here for the new formation ofa "congregation" answering to the circumstances and needs of thetime. Around the ruined sanctuary the community once more liftedup its head (1Kings viii.; Haggai i. seq.; Zechariah i. seq.).The usages and ordinances were, though everywhere changes indetail, yet not created afresh. Whatever creating there was layin this, that these usages were bound together in a system andmade the instruments of restoring an organisation of "the remnant."

Ezekiel first pointed out the way which was suited for the time.He is the connecting link between the prophets and the law. Heclaims to be a prophet, and starts from prophetic ideas: but theyare not his own ideas, they are those of his predecessors whichhe turns into dogmas. He is by nature a priest, and his peculiarmerit is that he enclosed the soul of prophecy in the body of acommunity which was not political, but founded on the temple andthe cultus. The chapters xl.-xlviii. are the most important inhis book, and have been called by J. Orth, not incorrectly, thekey of the Old Testament.

Thus arose that artificial product, the sacred constitution ofJudaism. In the Priestly Code we have the picture of it indetail. /1/

******************************************1. It is not the case that the hierocracy is based on thePriestly Code: that code was only introduced after thehierocracy was already in existence, but helped, no doubt, toconsolidate and legalise it. The written law afterwardsundermined the rule of the priests; and the scriptures playedinto the hands of the scribes and Pharisees. (Compare the caseof the Parsees and Sabians, and namely "p.157, note" is in error. There is no note on p. 157and I do not know what is being referred to ..>.)******************************************

The distinction, drawn with such pains between the Mosaictheocracy and the post-exilic hierocracy, is too fine. Theocracyas a constitution is hierocracy. If Moses founded such aconstitution, he did it prophetically, with a view to circumstanceswhich only arose a thousand years after his day, .Old Israel had not shrunk to a religious congregation, public lifewas not quite absorbed in the service of the sanctuary; the highpriest and the dwelling of Jehovah were not the centre round whichall revolved . These great changes werewrought by the destruction of the political existence first ofSamaria, then of Judah. In this way the people became "a kingdomof priests and a holy nation," as we read in a Deuteronomisticpassage, Exodus xix. 6. If the divine rule was formerly a beliefsupporting the natural ordinances of human society, it was now setforth in visible form as a divine state, in an artificial spherepeculiar to itself and transcending the ordinary life of the people.The idea had formerly informed and possessed the natural body, butnow, in order that it might be thoroughly realised, it was to havespiritual body of its own. There arose a material, external antithesisof a sacred and profane; men's minds came to be full of this, andit was their great endeavour to draw the line as sharply as possibleand to repress the natural sphere more and more. Holiness is theruling idea in Ezekiel, in Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., and in the PriestlyCode. The notion is a somewhat empty one, expressing rather whata thing is not than what it is; at first it meant the same as divine,but now it is used mainly in the sense of spiritual, priestly, as ifthe divine could be distinguished from the worldly, the natural, byoutward visible marks of that kind.

The Mosaic theocracy, the residuum of a ruined state, is itself nota state at all, but an unpolitical artificial product created inspite of unfavourable circumstances by the impulse of anever-memorable energy: and foreign rule is its necessarycounterpart. In its nature it is intimately allied to the oldCatholic church, which was in fact its child. As a matter of tasteit may be objectionable to speak of the Jewish church, but as amatter of history it is not inaccurate, and the name is perhapspreferable to that of theocracy, which shelters such confusion ofideas.

XI.II.2. The Mosaic theocracy appears to show an immenseretrogression. The law of Jehovah should denote what ischaracteristic of His people over against the heathen. Butthis certainly did not consist in the cultus of Israel: it wouldbe vain labour to seek in this and that slight variation betweenthe Hebrew and the Greek ritual a difference of principle betweenthem. The cultus is the heathen element in the Israelite religion--the word heathen not being understood, of course, in an ignoble orunworthy sense. If the Priestly Code makes the cultus the principalthing, that appears to amount to a systematic decline into theheathenism which the prophets incessantly combated and yet wereunable to eradicate. It will be readily acknowledged that at theconstitution of the new Jerusalem the prophetic impulses weredeflected by a previously existing natural tendency of the mass onwhich they had to operate. Yet in every part of the legal worshipwe see the most decided traces of their influence. We have seen towhat a large extent that worship is everywhere marked by acentralising tendency. This tendency is not connected in the PriestlyCode with opposition to improper or foreign worship; yet it must beinterpreted as a polemical measure; and if it be regarded as anaxiom necessary in the Priestly Code from the nature of the case,that is only saving that the demands of the prophets had prevailedmost completely in a field where they had the greatest obstacles tocontend with. Exclusive monolatry is by no means innate in thecultus; it can only be deduced from considerations which areforeign to the nature of the cultus: it is the antitype of strictmonotheism. The prohibition of images, too, in the worship of theDeity, is not expressly insisted on, as in Deuteronomy, but is aprovision which is taken for granted; so little is this positionin danger of question that even doubtful and repugnant elements areembodied in the worship and assimilated by it without hesitation.The golden ephod, denounced by Isaiah, has become an insignificantdecoration of the high-priest: talismans, forbidden even byEzekiel, are allowed (Numbers xv. 37-41), but the object of them is"that ye may look upon them and remember all the commandments ofJehovah, and do them, and that ye follow not after your own heartand your own eyes, after which ye used to go a whoring." The grossidolatry, with which the expression znh is always connected inother passages, is by this time out of the question: the heartitself with its lawless motions is the strange God, whose serviceis forbidden.

We may go further and say that by the cultus-legislation thecultus is estranged from its own nature, and overthrown in its ownsphere. That is most unmistakably the case with regard to thefestivals. They have lost their reference to harvest and cattle,and have become historical commemorations: they deny theirbirth from nature, and celebrate the institution of supernaturalreligion and the gracious acts of Jehovah therewith connected.The broadly human, the indigenous element falls away, they receivea statutory character and a significance limited to Israel.They no longer draw down the Deity into human life on all importantoccasions, to take part in its joys and its necessities: they arenot HUMAN ATTEMPTS with such naive means as are at command to pleasethe Deity and render Him favourable. They are removed from thenatural sphere, and made DIVINE MEANS OF GRACE, which Jehovah hasinstituted in Israel as sacraments of the theocracy. The worshipperno longer thinks that in his gift he is doing God a pleasure,providing Him with an enjoyment: what pleases Him and is effectualis only the strict observance of the rite. The sacrifices must beoffered exactly according to prescription: at the right place, atthe right time, by the right individuals, in the right way. They arenot based on the inner value of what is done, on the impulse arisingout of fresh occasions, but on the positive command of a will outsidethe worshipper, which is not explained, and which prescribes everyparticular. The bond between cultus and sensuality is severed:no danger can arise of an admixture of impure immoral elements,a danger which was always present in Hebrew antiquity. Worship nolonger springs from an inner impulse, it has come to be anexercise of religiosity. It has no natural significance; itssignificance is transcendental, incomparable, not to be defined;the chief effect of it, which is always produced with certainty,is atonement. For after the exile the consciousness of sin, calledforth by the rejection of the people from the face of Jehovah,was to a certain extent permanent: even when the hard service ofIsrael was accomplished and the wrath really blown over, it wouldnot disappear.

If then the value of the sacred offerings lay not in themselvesbut in obedience to the commandments of God, the centre of gravityof the cultus was removed from that exercise itself andtransferred to another field, that of morality. The consequencewas that sacrifices and gifts gave way to ascetic exerctses,which were more strictly and more simply connected with morality.Precepts given originally in reference to the consecration of thepriests for their religious functions were extended to the laity:the observance of these laws of physical cleanliness was of muchmore radical importance in Judaism than the great public cultus,and led by the straightest road towards the theocratic ideal ofholiness and of universal priesthood. The whole of life wascompressed into a certain holy path; there was always a divinecommand to be fulfilled, and by thinking of it a man kept himselffrom following after the desires and lusts of his own heart.On the other hand this private cultus, which constantly requiredattention, kept alive and active the individual sense of sin.

The great pathologist of Judaism is quite right: in the Mosaictheocracy the cultus became a pedagogic instrument of discipline.It is estranged from the heart; its revival was due to oldcustom, it would never have blossomed again of itself. It nolonger has its roots in childlike impulse, it is a dead work, inspite of all the importance attached to it, nay, just because ofthe anxious conscientiousness with which it was gone about. Atthe restoration of Judaism the old usages were patched together ina new system, which, however, only served as the form to preservesomething that was nobler in its nature, but could not have beensaved otherwise than in a narrow shell that stoutly resisted allforeign influences. That heathenism in Israel against which theprophets vainly protested was inwardly overcome by the law onits own ground; and the cultus, after nature had been killed init, became the shield of supernaturalistic monotheism.

The end of the Prolegomena

ISRAEL

Reprinted from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"

I S R A E L.

1. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATION.

According to the Book of Genesis, Israel was the brother of Edom,and the cousin of Moab and Ammon. These four petty peoples,which may be classed together as the Hebrew group, must at onetime have formed some sort of a unity and have passed through acommon history which resulted in their settlement insouth-eastern Palestine. The Israelites, or rather that section ofthe Hebrew group which afterwards developed into Israel, appear atfirst to have been the immediate neighbours of Edom, and to haveextended westwards towards the border of Egypt. As regards theethnological position of the Hebrews as a whole, tradition has itthat they had connexions not only with the Aramaeans of Osrhoene(Nahor), but also with certain of the old half-Arab inhabitants ofthe Sinaitic peninsula (Kenites, Amalek, Midian). To the Canaanites,whose language they had adopted, their relation was that of foreignconquerors and lords to a subject race (Gen. ix, 26).

Some fifteen centuries before our era a section of the Hebrew groupleft its ancient seat in the extreme south of Palestine to occupythe not distant pasture lands of Egypt (Goshen), where theycarried on their old calling, that of shepherds and goatherds.Although settled within the territory of the Pharaohs,and recognising their authority, they continued to retain alltheir old characteristics,--their language, their patriarchalinstitutions, their nomad habits of life.

But in course of time these foreign guests were subjected tochanged treatment. Forced labour was exacted of them for theconstruction of new public works in Goshen, an exaction which wasfelt to be an assault upon their freedom and honour, and which inpoint of fact was fitted to take away all that was distinctive oftheir nationality. But they had no remedy at hand, and hadsubmitted in despair, until Moses at last saw a favourableopportunity of deliverance. Reminding his oppressed brethrenof the God of their fathers, and urging that their cause was His,he taught them to regard self-assertion against the Egyptians asan article of religion; and they became once more a united peoplein a determination to seek refuge from oppression in the wildernesswhich was the dwelling-place of their kindred and the seat of theirGod. At a time when Egypt was scourged by a grievous plague, theHebrews broke up their settlement in Goshen one night in spring,and directed their steps towards their old home again. Accordingto the accounts, the king had consented to the exodus, and latterlyhad even forced it on, but it was none the less a secret flight.

To a not very numerous pastoral people such an undertakingpresented no great difficulty. Nevertheless its execution was notto be carried out unimpeded. The Hebrews, compelled to abandonthe direct eastward road (Exod. xiii. 17, 18), turned towardsthe south-west and encamped at last on the Egyptian shore of thenorthern arm of the Red Sea, where they were overtaken byPharaoh's army. The situation was a critical one; but a highwind during the night left the shallow sea so low that it becamepossible to ford it. Moses eagerly accepted the suggestion, andmade the venture with success. The Egyptians, rushing after, cameup with them on the further shore, and a struggle ensued. But theassailants fought at a disadvantage, the ground being ill suitedfor their chariots and horsemen; they fell into confusion andattempted a retreat. Meanwhile the wind had changed; the watersreturned, apd the pursuers were annihilated./1/

************************************1. Exod. xvi. 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31. According to the OldTestament the exodus took place 480 years before the building ofSolomon's temple, and 960 years before the end of the Babyloniancaptivity. These figures are "systematic" or at leastsystematised, but even so they are certainly more trustworthythan the combinations of the Egyptologists.************************************

After turning aside to visit Sinai as related in Exodus, theemigrants settled at Kadesh, eastwards from Goshen, on thesouthern borders of Palestine, /2/

***********************************2. The site of Sinai (= Horeb?) hardly admits of ascertainment.The best datum would be the sanctuary of Jethro, if we couldidentify it with Midian (Jakut, iv. 451), which lieson the Arabian coast of the Red Sea obliquely facing thetraditional Sinai. With regard to Qadesh, see QuarterlyStatement of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1871), pp. 20, 21.*************************************

where they remained for many years, having at the well of Kadeshtheir sanctuary and judgment-seat only, while with their flocksthey ranged over an extensive tract. In all probability theirstay at Kadesh was no involuntary detention; rather was it thislocality they had more immediately had in view in setting out.For a civilised community of from two to three millions such asettlement would, of course, have been impossible; but it wasquite sufficient for the immediate requirements of the Goshenshepherds, few in number as they were and inured to the life ofthe desert. That attempts may have been made by them to obtainpossession of the more fertile country to the north is very likely;but that from the outset they contemplated the conquest of thewhole of Palestine proper, and that it was only in expiation ofa fault that they were held back at the gate of the promised landuntil the whole generation of the disobedient had died out, is nothistorically probable.

We can assign a definite reason for their final departure fromKadesh. In the district to the east of Jordan the (Canaanite)Amorites had, sometime previously, driven the Ammonites from thelower Jabbok and deprived the Moabites of all their territory tothe north of the Arnon; on the plateau opposite Jericho Heshbonhad become the capital of Sihon, the Amorite king. This sovereignnow set himself to subdue southern Moab also, and not withoutsuccess."Fire went out from Heshbon, flame from the stronghold of Sihon,devoured the cities of Moab upon the heights of Arnon.Woe to thee, O Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh!"From these straits the Moabites were rescued by their cousins,the nomads of the wilderness of Kadesh. The Israelites cameforward on behalf of what was at once the common Hebrew causeand their own particular interest; they took the field againstthe Amorites, vanquished them in battle, and broke up the kingdomof Sihon. The consequence was that the land to the south of theArnon remained in the undisputed possession of Moab, while thevictors themselves became masters of the territory immediatelyto the north. Settled thus between Moab and Ammon their kinsmen,the Israelites supplied the link that was wanting in the chain ofpetty Hebrew nationalities established in the south of easternPalestine.

The army that went out against the Amorites from Kadesh wascertainly not exclusively composed of men who, or whose fathers,had accomplished the passage of the Red Sea Israel was not aformed nation when it left Egypt; and throughout the whole periodof its sojourn in the wilderness it continued to be in process ofgrowth. Instead of excluding the kindred elements which offeredthemselves to it on its new soil, it received and assimilated them.The life they had lived together under Moses had been the firstthing to awaken a feeling of solidarity among the tribes whichafterwards constituted the nation; whether they had previouslybeen a unity in any sense of the word is doubtful. On the otherhand, the basis of the unification of the tribes must certainlyhave been laid before the conquest of Palestine proper; for withthat it broke up, though the memory of it continued. At the sametime it must not be supposed that all the twelve tribes alreadyexisted side be side in Kadesh. The sons of the concubines ofJacob--Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher--manifestly do not pertainto Israel in the same sense as do those of Leah and Rachel;probably they were late arrivals and of very mixed origin.We know, besides, that Benjamin was not born until afterwards,in Palestine. If this view be correct, Israel at first consistedof seven tribes, of which one only, that of Joseph, traced itsdescent to Rachel, though in point of numbers and physical strengthit was the equal of all the others together, while in intellectualforce it surpassed them. The remaining six were the sons ofLeah:--Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah; Issachar, Zebulon. They arealways enumerated in this order; the fact that the last two arealso invariably mentioned apart from the rest and after Josephhas its explanation in geographical considerations.

The time of Moses is invariably regarded as the properly creativeperiod in Israel's history, and on that account also as givingthe pattern and norm for the ages which followed. In point offact the history of Israel must be held to have begun then, andthe foundations of a new epoch to have been laid. The prophetswho came after gave, it is true, greater distinctness to the peculiarcharacter of the nation, but they did not make it; on the contrary,it made them. Again, it is true that the movement whichresulted in the establishment of the monarchy brought togetherfor the first time into organic unity the elements whichpreviously had existed only in an isolated condition; butIsrael's sense of national personality was a thing of much earlierorigin, which even in the time of the judges bound thevarious tribes and families together, and must have had a greathold on the mind of the nation, although there was no formal andbinding constitution to give it support. When the Israelitessettled in Palestine they found it inhabited by a populationsuperior to themselves both in numbers and in civilisation, whichthey did not extirpate, but on the contrary gradually subduedand absorbed. The process was favoured by affinity of raceand similarity of speech; but, however far it went, it never hadthe effect of making Israelites Canaanites; on the contrary, itmade Canaanites Israelites. Notwithstanding their inferiority,numerical and otherwise, they maintained their individuality,and that without the support of any external organisation.